Introduction

The Challenge

To insure vehicles for both internal fleets and external insurance customers, users were required to submit a vehicle registration document and manually enter the necessary data, which was slow and error prone. The insurer explored a third-party solution based on visual recognition and AI, but it proved too expensive and slow, taking up to 50 seconds per scan. The business needed a faster, more efficient system that could process data reliably without manual effort and scale automatically to control costs. The solution also had to handle poorly aligned or folded images and ensure secure, high-confidence data for insurance policy creation.

The Solution

Friendly Nerds developed a fully serverless and event-driven platform that enables customers to upload photos of their vehicle registration document through an app or chatbot. The system tolerates poor alignment or folded documents and uses OCR to extract relevant data automatically.

Each document is passed through a series of validation checks, including image quality scoring and plausibility of extracted values. A confidence score determines whether AI-based automation is sufficient or if fallback to human verification is needed. This dual-layer approach ensures high accuracy without sacrificing speed.

By combining AWS Lambda, Step Functions, S3, and API Gateway with AI and business logic, the platform remains cost-effective at scale and delivers an end-to-end experience in under five seconds. The solution was implemented iteratively, adding features and test cases over multiple short development cycles.

Implementation Process

1. Discovery & Planning
   • Reviewed core business goals and operational pain points
   • Created early prototypes and mockups
2. Prototyping
   • Developed MVP within 50 hours
   • Feature-by-feature expansion through iterative development sprints
3. Testing & Validation
   • Extensive edge-case testing to improve OCR accuracy and robustness
   • Added support for additional business scenarios
4. Integration & Rollout
   • Integrated with existing insurance systems
   • Established a lightweight, event-based operational setup

Results Achieved

• Operational Cost Savings: Reduced from tens of thousands Swiss francs to less than 1,000 CHF per year du to the event based architecture.
• Performance: Cut processing time from 50 seconds to under 5 seconds
• Accuracy: 95%+ of required fields extracted reliably
• Competitive Advantage: Outperformed all tested off-the-shelf alternatives in price and performance.

Lessons Learned

• AI capabilities have evolved rapidly and could now deliver the same solution 4x faster
• A successful AI initiative starts with business goals, not just technical ambition,